Save Article

What Makes a Resilient Leader?

Save Article

Leaders are being continually put to the test in today’s volatile marketplace. Industries face disruption, risks both known and unknown abound, and crises seem to lurk around every corner.

Chris Ruggeri

More than 20 CEOs and other leaders who have survived and thrived in the face of risk, crisis and disruption were asked about building resilient muscle, and their views are captured in the Resilient podcast series hosted by Mike Kearney, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP. Using the backstory of critical events to understand leaders’ thinking and decision-making, four questions emerged from the interviews about resilient leadership, as well as key takeaways on how leaders can address challenges and focus on value-creating opportunities associated with risk, crisis and disruption.

How Can You Double Down on Disruption?

Disruption isn’t going anywhere. That’s why leading organizations need to develop a systematic approach for accelerating discovery, scanning ruthlessly, confronting biases and preparing for unexpected change, as a way to stay ahead of, and address, potential disruption. For example, organizations may want to leverage sensing tools to spot trends, apply scenario planning to identify risks and opportunities associated with those trends, and test assumptions to identify and address biases in strategic priorities.

What Does It Mean to Successfully Paint Outside the Lines?

One of the classic first lessons many of us are taught as kids is, “Don’t paint outside the lines.” Whether this is good advice for children is debatable. But for business leaders, there are times when painting outside the lines is exactly what’s needed.

Mike Kearney

Making big bet decisions in an uncertain business environment with many variables isn’t for the faint of heart. The challenge is to take smart risks. Those who serve in the risk function must learn to walk in the shoes of the business, providing expertise and consultation to key stakeholders. This helps executives be more objective in decision-making, so they can focus on value-added strategies—not just strategies that preserve value.

As tempting as it may be to simply look away, successful leaders also need to put mechanisms in place that analyze data and connect the dots between risks and opportunities. Smart executives know that playing it safe with a paint-by-number formula doesn’t cut it in today’s competitive landscape. The truth is, no company can survive market disruption without taking some risks. That’s how organizations move beyond painting by numbers to create a masterpiece.

Who Owns the Role of Protecting and Growing Your Organization’s Brand Value?

Don’t simply wait for a crisis to test the organization’s brand and reputation’s resilience. Proactively prepare for the worst while also laying the groundwork for the best. Using this approach, executives can enhance long-term value in brand equity, market differentiation, customer loyalty and strategic positioning.

How Can You Emerge Stronger from a Crisis?

No organization can avoid an unexpected crisis that may potentially cause major disruption or damage. But an organization can prepare to survive a crisis and recover more quickly by making crisis protocols second nature, establishing strong communication and collaboration among teams, and capturing lessons learned when a crisis hits. And when a crisis does occur, resilient leaders use it as an opportunity to fix things that aren’t working, go from defense to offense and emerge in a way that ultimately makes the organization stronger.

Whether it’s a value-destroying crisis, a shift in industry dynamics or a high-stakes investment in the future, uncertainty comes in many shapes, sizes and impacts. Effective leaders know that their ability to navigate risk, crisis and disruption will likely determine their business’s ability to evolve and be successful over time. Resilient leaders take risk management a step further and ask themselves, “What am I doing today to prepare for tomorrow’s threats? And tomorrow’s opportunities?”

Related Deloitte Insights

Leaders from business and government, including a former supreme commander of NATO, a former CEO of Harley-Davidson, a former vice chair of GE, and others, share their stories about how they successfully navigated risk, crisis, and disruption. Based on discussions with CEOs, senior business executives, and other leaders that were interviewed as part of Deloitte’s “Resilient” podcast series, these stories provide leadership insights on such topics as remaining humble, innovating and evolving, being transparent, and surviving disruption.

The recent intensity of the hurricane season has put a new emphasis on how organizations deliver on their crisis response planning and execution. An effective response requires timely information gathering and planning related to employees and critical assets, plus skills in interacting with other important stakeholders, including business partners, customers and shareholders during the recovery period, as Chris Ruggeri and Kathie Schwerdtfeger, both with Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory’s Strategic Risk practice, discuss. They also explain the role of the board during a natural disaster crisis response and reputational risk issues to consider.

The challenges of responding to a crisis involve having to understand and address numerous concerns in real time, including defining the crisis, determining the cause, and generating options to stop and address impacts. Two critical areas to consider include developing a common operating picture, for a single, identical display of relevant information to share across the response team, and prioritizing stakeholders, which can help C-suite leaders develop an engagement strategy.

Views & Analysis

Culture is often an overlooked foundation of an organization’s strategy and performance. Yet today diagnostic tools, cognitive analytics, risk sensing and other technologies can provide organizations insights into day-to-day risk factors embedded within their cultures. Carey Oven, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP, discusses the challenges organizations face in improving their culture risk profile and ways they can help protect their culture and monitor risks that could damage it.

Recent corporate scandals linked to problematic company cultures have led directors to look for ways to better monitor corporate culture, while trying to understand potential risks and address problems before they become a significant challenge. By treating culture risk as part of an integrated process of oversight that addresses strategy, performance, and risk—and taking a proactive and persistent approach—boards can improve their oversight of culture risk. Learn some general approaches to culture risk oversight that management and boards alike should consider.

Traditionally, internal audit (IA) has focused on providing assurance with respect to known risks and the effectiveness of controls in mitigating those risks. Regulators, however, are increasingly interested in an organization’s ability to identify blind spots and other vulnerabilities that may undermine the integrity of the risk management environment, including the risk of misconduct. IA functions can play a pivotal role by substantively testing culture and identifying potential risk-related outliers that may not be visible via other means, such as supervisory frameworks, escalations, compliance assessment and testing, and previous audits.

Editor's Choice

Robert Hull, chairman of the board of SPX FLOW and a director at Bojangles’ Inc., draws on a deep background in finance and operations for his current governance roles. The former CFO of Lowe’s Companies discusses how his finance career prepared him for a board role, and offers suggestions for what finance chiefs seeking to serve on a board can do to prepare. He also talks about the board’s role in risk management and strategy oversight.

New training models are providing organizations tools to measure, monitor, and address ethical and unethical behaviors. However, ethics training still has far to go to be effective, according to both Christopher Adkins, executive director of the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership, and Maureen Mohlenkamp, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP. They discuss ways to strengthen ethics programs, advances in whistleblower helplines and how technology is impacting ethics training.

Digital risks are becoming a rising concern for the C-suite and boards, as industries continue to converge and companies adopt new business models to compete. Understand what steps can be deployed to address the strategic risks that come with today’s digital technologies in this conversation with William Ribaudo, managing partner of Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory’s Digital Risk Venture Portfolio, Deloitte & Touche LLP. Also, learn why organizations should reassess their business models to understand their digital maturity.

About Deloitte Insights

Deloitte’s Insights for C-suite executives and board members provide information and resources to help address the challenges of managing risk for both value creation and protection, as well as increasing compliance requirements.